Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[00:21]
Hi, I’m Joel Martin with HFS Research. Joining me today is Manish Rai, VP of Product Marketing at SnapLogic. Hi, Manish, how are you?
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[00:29]
I’m doing great, Joel. Happy to be here and I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[00:29]
Yeah, we talked all summer and we went into a lot of debates about the future of GPT APIs, the need to connect systems. And we actually wrote a report on that, and that’s part of our Hot Tech package. It’s on our website. And you know, our conversations were so rich, I thought, why just leave them on paper? Let’s have a real conversation about what Snap’s doing and get some stories of how you’re seeing this practically used by your customers in the field. And fundamentally, that’s my very first question. Why do we need a solution like SnapLogic’s GPT and your solutions in general?
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[00:53]
Joel, as you have been seeing over the years, the pace of change is continuing to accelerate, right? We had the internet, then mobile, then cloud, and today, GenAI. And what’s happened during this time is the amount of data and number of applications have just exploded. So if you talk to a typical enterprise, they’ll have 500-plus SaaS applications and similar or more homegrown applications, and they’re drowning in this complexity trying to connect all these systems and trying to make sense of the data. So what SnapLogic does is it really unifies integration into a single platform, whether you’re connecting to data or apps on-prem or in the cloud, and it really makes it easy for them to integrate, automate, and orchestrate the flow of data across the enterprise. We let them focus on what’s important to them — innovating — rather than firefighting.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[02:11]
OK. One of the things that we talked about that really impressed me is you guys moved quickly into the GenAI world. You really saw how, given what you just talked about, the complexity of those apps, data, and integration can go beyond automation and add intelligence to it with GenAI. And that’s what really impressed me with your GenAI Builder, SnapGPT, and your integration catalog. So how do you see yourselves continuing to innovate and lead the market with this? And what has been the reaction from your customers on how they’re deploying these to address a lot of the challenges that you just described?
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[02:30]
Yeah, I mean, we saw the potential of AI before anybody else in our industry, and we’ve been investing for 8 years. And then when GPT took off — ChatGPT went from 0 to 100 million in almost no time, so to speak — we quickly jumped and saw the potential to simplify integration for our customers. So we launched our integration co-pilot that really makes it easy to create pipelines, document them, generate sample data, SQL queries, expressions, everything, and really simplifies the time it takes to learn our system and become a creator. And then our customers started coming to us and they said, you’ve built a co-pilot, I want to build my own co-pilots and applications, can you help me with that? So we created what we called at the time GenAI App Builder, and it’s really taken off. We have dozens of customers, many of them in production, and a big chunk of our pipeline is around GenAI. And the reason is that before enterprises can take advantage of GenAI, they have to really modernize their architecture — a platform that can unify app, data, and integration, and get their data ready for AI. That’s what people are struggling with when they pick point solutions that promise all this innovation and ability to build apps. They find they get bogged down in integration. Good news is we already have it. And then we are innovating at the pace of GenAI, giving them connectivity to LLMs, vector databases, utilities, everything they need to rapidly build these applications, and it’s really taken off.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[04:36]
And you’re really empowering the IT organization with these tools. Like you said, we’re almost going back, instead of discrete applications, to systems design — leveraging this data across systems and applications to really empower people and employees to get more out of their role based on the technology that’s available to them. What kind of business outcomes are you hearing from your customers they’re able to achieve?
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[05:05]
Yeah, I’ll give you an example of one of our first customers to go into production. It’s Syant, and Syant had two legacy platforms, one for data and one for apps, so they picked us to modernize the architecture. They were able to replace these because they used to have an army of people come every 6 months just to upgrade and maintain those systems. And then they wanted to accelerate the pace of GenAI, and the first area they looked at was sales productivity. So the customer was able to build a business intelligence solution, which took RSS feeds from Google Alerts and summarized them in the context of the company, their products, their competitors, what’s happening in the industry, what’s happening at strategic customers. They’ve moved on to summarize call transcripts and generate prospecting emails in the context of the customer. All that result is they’re seeing a 5% uplift in sales productivity and a 90% reduction in the costs of maintaining the system and total cost of ownership. And moreover, one interesting insight that came from it: they tried building in the existing CRM platform, and what they found is all these solutions are coming out with co-pilots, and it’s per-user fees. So you have hundreds and thousands of sales reps — imagine the cost if you’re paying $20, $30, $40 a month. It all adds up. With our platform, they actually pay for consumption, how much they consume in APIs, so their costs go down. I think it’s going to usher in the great software unbundling of these packaged software, because you only pay for what you need. Typically you’re paying for the big packages and using less than 5% of the functionality. And now people can really unbundle all that.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[06:59]
Yeah, you’ve touched on two things in this discussion already that are passions of mine. One, getting out from underneath all these subscriptions that we bought for bespoke solutions and then being required to stay up with those payments — when really what you want is an integrated system that empowers people. And that’s what impressed me early on when we were talking: how Snap’s roadmap and the tools you’re building on your core, and all these new tools that use intelligence to help the IT organization and the business work smarter and deliver results, is right there. And the other piece is just getting out from underneath all the legacy. So being able to use these tools to be more effective — I feel that’s what really makes you different. Do you agree, or what am I missing?
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[07:44]
No, absolutely, you hit the nail with that, because really what we are seeing is two motions in the enterprise. There’s tremendous need to modernize the architecture, migrate away from on-premises tools — not only for integration, but others — into cloud environments. And the second is tremendous pressure to accelerate the pace of GenAI-powered transformation, because I was looking at a report where companies are now — every function is allocating between 5 and 7% of their budget to GenAI. And think about the pressure that’s putting on IT. They have to leverage that budget to drive transformation, maintain the headcount, and increase productivity at the same time. So we feel like we are in the right place. We have the right solution at the right time, and we are fortunate to really architect a solution which speaks the language of APIs and JSON, and our data flows through it, which works really well for the unstructured, semi-structured data that is being leveraged for many of the new GenAI applications to unlock the next level of value.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[08:50]
So how are you helping your traditional customer, the apps lead or the CIO, really articulate that story to their business partners? Because what I like to see is, you know, the IT organization likes to buy platforms, and that’s why they have a lot of challenges right now — they have a lot of platforms. Your story is all about getting the most out of the systems that they’ve bought into and delivering a solution. As you’re working with them, how do you articulate and help them move to that next level of conversation with their business about empowering them, about why this tool is different than buying something off the shelf again?
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[09:46]
Yeah, I think in a way we have to do a more consultative selling in this, because we have to go into the customer and paint the art of the possible, right? We talk to them: hey, listen, based on the innovators who have been successful with us, what they’ve done is they’ve taken a very measured approach, but very rapidly. They want to modernize the architecture, select a platform that can help with that. Next, to allow them to get their data ready for AI. And then they need a solution that allows them to build GenAI apps and agents very rapidly — look at a partner who’s innovating at the pace of GenAI, because LLMs are evolving, the APIs are evolving, vector databases are sprouting up everywhere, and you need new utilities to process unstructured data. So you need a partner who can handle all of that and the pace of innovation. And then you can get into ideation, and we give them examples of a broad set of use cases we are seeing by function, by industry, and help them pick the low-hanging fruit that can be implemented to get them quick wins. And by taking that approach, many of these former data and integration leaders are getting promoted into AI-governance roles and leaders of GenAI. So we are helping them elevate the role. You come from the RPA world. You saw how the role of the shared services leader got elevated. They got a seat at the table by becoming GBS leaders — right, Global Business Services — and they went up the stack. You’re seeing the same thing happening for data and integration leaders in this space.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[11:23]
You’re spot on there. In fact, one of the things I look after a lot is low code and no code, and more and more generative coding. But a lot of the tools that are being rolled out for those lack a true API, because as they move from legacy COBOL or C or even Java into JSON or microservices apps, they need to have an API strategy. And to me, this is an area where — what I’ve learned about you guys from our conversations, from diving into your technology roadmaps — that’s where you guys continue to think about what’s going to be required, as more solutions go back to a build cycle to really empower the business, and how to make sure all these things are still integrated and communicating with each other. But my question to you is, how will you stay ahead of all this rapid iteration that’s going on with empowering individuals to create apps and converting legacy to modern apps? What are you doing to stay ahead of the game there?
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[12:42]
It’s just that you have to move fast. We have made it mandatory for every team inside our company to be leveraging GenAI to become more productive — be it the marketing function, finance, our engineering teams, customer support. So we are sort of drinking our own champagne here, so to speak, so we can move fast. And then we are reallocating our engineering resources to invest much more on GenAI, because that’s where the puck is going, and we want to be ahead of that and repurpose our resources. And to the point of APIs, we have integrated API management into the platform, so every agent or app or assistant that you build that leverages GenAI, you can publish it as an API in our platform, and everyone can use it and drive reuse from there. So that works really well and helps enterprises scale these solutions. What we found early on is that many people were enamored by LangChain, LlamaIndex, and they found they are now hand-coding — and then how do you get it to production? Who maintains it? Where’s the observability? Where is the reuse of all that? So then they come to our platform and they say, oh gosh, what took me 6 months, I can do in weeks, and I get governance, observability, and all the management for free.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Telecommunications, Media and High-Tech, HFS Research[13:57]
Oh, you’re spot on there. In fact, one of the areas where SnapLogic I think is going to be essential for companies is as they take a lot of their own GenAI projects and look to scale those from POCs to real enterprise-grade solutions. The dependency on using a solution like yours to facilitate the connections across their systems, their applications, and their data sources — that’s going to be essential to truly scaling POCs. And that’s why I’m excited about where you guys are going. I’m excited about your roadmap, and I really enjoyed talking to you today. So, Manish, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure seeing you again. And I’ll see you soon, next time I’m in California.
Manish Rai — VP of Product Marketing, SnapLogic[14:55]
Thank you, Joel. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you, and I’m looking forward to continuing to engage with you.
